Sascha Wil­son

The Gov­ern­ment is be­ing asked to al­low Pa­tri­ot­ic En­er­gies and Tech­nolo­gies Lim­it­ed’s pro­pos­al to be in­de­pen­dent­ly eval­u­at­ed again be­fore con­sid­er­ing oth­er op­tions for the sale of Petrotrin’s Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery.

The re­quest was made by Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU) pres­i­dent-gen­er­al An­cel Ro­get at a press con­fer­ence at the union’s San Fer­nan­do yes­ter­day, in re­sponse to Gov­ern­ment’s re­jec­tion of Pa­tri­ot­ic’s Sep­tem­ber 29 pro­pos­al.

Dur­ing a vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence on Sat­ur­day, En­er­gy and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan said Pa­tri­ot­ic’s fi­nal pro­pos­al failed to ad­dress the three key is­sues con­cern­ing the ac­qui­si­tion. He said is­sues were pur­chase price fi­nanc­ing, restart fi­nanc­ing and first pri­or­i­ty lien on the as­sets. Khan said the Gov­ern­ment was com­mit­ted to restart­ing the re­fin­ery with pri­vate cap­i­tal in­jec­tion.

How­ev­er, Ro­get yes­ter­day said they were sur­prised by Khan’s state­ments, as Pa­tri­ot­ic’s pro­pos­al had ad­dressed the key is­sues and they had al­so of­fered an up­front cash pay­ment.

While they were con­cerned by Khan’s state­ment that Gov­ern­ment was now con­sid­er­ing its op­tions, Ro­get said he felt the min­is­te­r­i­al team did not give them­selves time to prop­er­ly re­view their pro­pos­al, not­ing it was a com­plex doc­u­ment.

As such, he re­quest­ed that the pro­pos­al be put be­fore the same Cab­i­net-ap­point­ed eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee that ini­tial­ly re­viewed the union’s sub­mis­sions to the ten-point con­di­tion (for the sale of the re­fin­ery) set out by the Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert.

“We are con­cerned but at the same time our re­quest this morn­ing is for the Gov­ern­ment, in the in­ter­est of the coun­try of Trinidad and To­ba­go, to stay their hands but at the same time give an op­por­tu­ni­ty for this lat­est pro­pos­al, which is in line with the min­is­ter’s of­fer, which seeks to get over the hur­dle of the stum­bling block that they have, al­low for that to be prop­er­ly eval­u­at­ed,” Ro­get said.

De­scrib­ing the ac­qui­si­tion process as long and pro­longed, he said the union has paid tens of mil­lions of dol­lars to pro­duce the re­quired doc­u­ments, in­clud­ing a com­pre­hen­sive busi­ness plan, de­tailed mar­ket stud­ies, which has in­for­ma­tion about new mar­kets that Petrotrin nev­er ex­plored, de­tailed fea­si­bil­i­ty stud­ies and all Pa­tri­ot­ic’s tech­ni­cal knowl­edge. He said he was now con­cerned that all these doc­u­ments were in the Trinidad Pe­tro­le­um Hold­ing Ltd (TPHL) team and board’s pos­ses­sion.

Giv­ing a chrono­log­i­cal time­line of the events in their quest to ac­quire the re­fin­ery, he said, “On No­vem­ber 14, 2019, the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance pub­licly an­nounced that Pa­tri­ot­ic met all the ten con­di­tions, of which restart fi­nanc­ing was num­ber one, and there­fore it is clear that that dealt with Min­is­ter Khan’s is­sue of restart fi­nanc­ing.

“And I want to say at this point, that we recom­mit­ted and we stat­ed in writ­ing in our pro­pos­al that we de­liv­er on the 29th on the is­sue of restart fi­nanc­ing. There­fore, in our re­spect­ful view that would have dealt with the num­ber two-point, of restart fi­nanc­ing.”

He said it was on­ly on Ju­ly 17 that Pa­tri­ot­ic was first alert­ed that TPHL had ma­jor dif­fi­cul­ties over­com­ing some in­ter­nal fi­nanc­ing is­sues re­lat­ing to the deal of­fer made to Pa­tri­ot­ic by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert on Sep­tem­ber 20. This of­fer in­clud­ed a three-year mora­to­ri­um, ten years to pay the pur­chase price at a fair mar­ket val­ue in­ter­est rate and a ten-point con­di­tion to be an­swered in one month. He said they re­ceived doc­u­men­ta­tion on TPHL’s fi­nan­cial chal­lenges on Sep­tem­ber 11, adding Pa­tri­ot­ic was nev­er of­fi­cial­ly ad­vised of the Oc­to­ber 31 dead­line.

De­spite their re­quests for a meet­ing, he said it was on­ly on Oc­to­ber 21 that the min­is­te­r­i­al team met with Pa­tri­ot­ic to dis­cuss the chal­lenges.

“Pa­tri­ot­ic have sug­ges­tions as to how they could over­come this ma­jor chal­lenge but was in­formed that they would have dif­fi­cul­ties with those sug­ges­tions,” Ro­get said.

Based on that and the fact that TPHL’s chal­lenges af­fect­ed Im­bert’s of­fer, he said Pa­tri­ot­ic held dis­cus­sions with their in­ter­na­tion­al part­ners and ad­just­ed their pro­pos­al.

“And af­ter just six work­ing days, we would have come back with an up­front cash pro­pos­al sup­port­ed by a let­ter from one of the top ten world in­vest­ment banks signed off by three of their glob­al heads.”

He re­called that the union had ini­tial­ly of­fered a US$77 mil­lion up­front cash pay­ment but ac­cept­ed the of­fer made by the min­is­ter.

“This is not just for OW­TU, this is not just for Pa­tri­ot­ic, this is for Trinidad and To­ba­go and there­fore ours is a firm com­mit­ment, reaf­firmed on many oc­ca­sions, to do all that is hu­man­ly pos­si­ble and nec­es­sary to en­sure that those as­sets re­main in the hands of lo­cal Trin­bag­o­ni­ans,” Ro­get said.

Ro­get said their pro­pos­al would have ad­dressed all of the is­sues but he felt that giv­en the dead­line set by the Prime Min­is­ter, the min­is­te­r­i­al team would not have “af­ford­ed them­selves enough time to go through in a com­pre­hen­sive way” all is­sues and ten­ants of the lat­est pro­pos­al.